Peter Schreier's ever-supple tenor, honed by keen-eyed intelligence and a verbal palate sharp enough to taste and try every last word, makes him a Wolf interpreter of the highest order. In this meticulously shaped programme of 22 of Wolf's eager settings of Mörike, one wonder appears after another. Schreier and his ever- sentient pianist, Karl Engel, move from a gentle awakening of love, which grows in intensity towards the innermost core of songs of doubt and fear, and on through a gallery of wonderfully dry, wry tableaux to the final farewell and the kicking of the critic downstairs. The first song here, ImFrühling, epitomises the equilibrium, security and entirety of performances which have grown from long-pondered consideration.
The long, drowsy vowels, and Schreier's sensitivity to the high-register placing of crucial words of longing all fuse into the slow-walking movement of cloud, wing, river, breeze, as language becomes expanded and enriched by tone. Schreier's remarkable steadiness of line in Verborgenheit reveals the song's secrets only reluctantly: the fierce intensity of sudden illumination is all the more searing.
Grotesquerie and poignancy coexist in Bei einerTrauung, and we feel every catch of the voice as Schreier turns weird and whimsical tale-teller in Storchenbotschaft.